E.J. Dionne commentary: Proper gratitude requires that each of us keeps on giving

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Thursday November 28, 2013 5:27 AM

Thanksgiving Day is awash in sentiment, but gratitude is not a sentiment. It’s a virtue. It’s
certainly nice, but it is more than a feeling or an emotion. Properly understood, gratitude is
hard, because it entails both an admission and a demand.

A genuine sense of gratitude is rooted in the realization that when I think about all that I am,
all that I have, and all that I might have achieved, I cannot claim to have done any of this by
myself. None of us is really “self-made.” We must all acknowledge the importance of the help,
advice, comfort and loyalty that came from others.

Gratitude can flow not just to individuals but also to a family, a neighborhood, a society or a
nation. We don’t choose the family into which we are born or the environment our parents fostered.
If we’re generally happy, might our disposition owe at least in part to our upbringing, or perhaps
even to accidental genetic forces? If we belong to a once-oppressed group, we are in debt to those
who waged battles that have brought us closer to equal treatment. We enjoy a natural world that was
conserved for us, even if it has sometimes been despoiled.

Gratitude means remembering that only immigrants can say that they chose the country in which
they live. If we are citizens of a free and democratic land, we did not erect the institutions that
make it so. And those of us who now enjoy these gifts did not sacrifice our lives for them, as many
before us did.

It seems to fair to assume that gratitude may come more easily to those who are religious. The
religious person, after all, sees the universe and everything in it as having been set in motion by
a benevolent deity. This is why humility is a virtue preached, in one way or another, by nearly
every religious tradition — even if religious people do not always practice it, and even if many
nonreligious people do.

Gratitude is built into the very structure of most forms of faith. Offering thanks is probably
the second most common prayer, the first being requests that God might grant us some favor or save
us from some evil. The Lord’s Prayer is instructive here.

But religious gratitude is neither automatic nor obvious. Many who are poor and disenfranchised
regularly thank God for blessings, even when so much about their lives seems cursed. Perhaps those
for whom life can be so fragile are more inclined than the privileged to be grateful when things do
not fly apart entirely.

And for the fortunate person, religious gratitude can be deformed by arrogance or challenged by
doubt. Someone who is lucky and thanks God for his fortune may not even consider why God might have
left so many across town or on the other side of the world to live in despair. And the religious
soul who does ponder such injustices must ask why a loving God has not simply delivered everyone
already.

John F. Kennedy, whose life we celebrated and whose death we mourned again last week, offered a
theologically ambiguous but highly useful injunction. It could be read as the testimony of a
serious believer or as signaling, at best, faith in a very distant God. “Here on earth,” Kennedy
said in his inaugural address, “God’s work must truly be our own.”

Kennedy was saying to the religious and nonreligious alike that making the world more godly is
not a task we can delegate. Harvey Cox, the theologian and my old teacher, was much taken by
Kennedy and argued that the original sin in the Garden of Eden story was not pride but sloth. In
his 1967 book
On Not Leaving It to the Snake, Cox insisted that Adam and Eve erred by failing to take
responsibility. They left the most important decision of their lives to a serpent.

A call to responsibility lies at the heart of gratitude. If faith without works is dead,
gratitude without generosity of spirit is empty. By reminding us of how much we owe to others, or
to social arrangements, or to fate, or to God, gratitude creates an obligation to repay our debts
by repairing injustices and reaching out to those whom luck has failed. Gratitude is a response to
acts of love. It demands more of the same — nothing more, nothing less.